Barry Dickson

In 1994, Dickson joined Corey Goodman for postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he started working on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of axon pathfinding.

Dickson continued this work while establishing his own research group at the University of Zurich. In 1998, Dickson moved to Vienna where he became group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) for five years, followed by a position as senior scientist at the newly founded Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA).

Around this time, his research focus shifted to a new topic, the genetic basis of complex innate behavior in Drosophila. In 2005, he published a key paper in which he described a master gene for sex specific behavior in fruit flies, which stimulated discussions beyond the scientific community.^[2] Shortly after this discovery, Dickson received a Wittgenstein Award in recognition of his work.

In 2006, Dickson succeeded Kim Nasmyth as scientific director of the IMP. Research in his lab now focused more on understanding the genetic and neural underpinnings of innate behaviors in Drosophila.^[3]

In 2013, Dickson followed a call to the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dickson continued his studies of fruit fly mating behavior to help uncover how the brain processes information and makes decisions.^[4] Using thermogenetic screening, Dickson and his research group identified neurons in the fruit fly’s brain that cause a change in locomotion. In a paper published in 2014, they describe four lines of flies that walked backward on heat activation. The scientists were able to track down these changes to specific nerve cells in the fly brain which they dubbed „moonwalker neurons“.^[5][6]